Pivot: How Top Entrepreneurs Adapt and Change Course to Find Ultimate Success

Chapter 3

The Corporate Entrepreneur

So you want to be a corporate entrepreneur. To better understand what this means, we need the perspectives from the academic and business sides to see what we mean by corporate entrepreneurship.

An Examination of the Definition

Our definition of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is: Corporate entrepreneurship is the creation of new businesses within and outside the company, which leverage current competencies and evolve new ones through innovation for the purposes of growth and corporate renewal.

Academic thought and business practices have evolved significantly in the past 20 to 30 years. Terms such as intrapreneurship,¹ corporate venturing,² and corporate entrepreneurship³ have been used to describe a company's entrepreneurial pursuits. Today, the term corporate entrepreneurship has evolved as the label of choice when referring to organizational efforts to leverage current competencies and evolve new ones through innovation in new product market spaces. It extends beyond technology-based innovation to new business models, processes, and so on. New business model innovation is often the driver in service industries, with information technology as the enabler. In addition, CE is becoming recognized as a set of activities that promotes organizational learning, leading to the creation of new skills, competencies, and valuable firm-specific knowledge.⁴ Its financial value to the firm, in terms of growth and profitability, has been empirically demonstrated ...